Such
futuristic scenarios may become reality one day
thanks to $3 million in grants awarded by Stanford
University's Bio-X program this week. Twenty-one new
interdisciplinary research projects -- including the
artificial cornea and wireless gastric endocapsule
projects -- will obtain funding from Bio-X during the
next two to three years.

The
grants were designed to encourage innovative research
in the biological sciences among faculty, students
and staff campuswide. This year's recipients include
a surprisingly wide range of interdisciplinary
projects -- from experiments on how individual brain
cells communicate in mice to research on how elephant
herds communicate long distances by stomping their
feet.

"The
diversity of these projects is truly exciting,"
said Bio-X Chair Matthew P. Scott, a professor of
developmental biology and of genetics. "These
seed grants are intended to boost collaborations
among people from different departments and schools
who hadn't worked together before."

The
wireless gastric endocapsule project, for example, is
a collaboration between faculty members Jacques Van
Dam of the School of Medicine and George Springer of
the School of Engineering. Their goal is to find a
substitute for invasive endoscopy -- a standard
diagnostic procedure in which a large probe is
inserted in the patient's mouth and throat. Van Dam
and Springer hope to design a wireless electronic
capsule ("endocapsule") that could be
swallowed without sedation and would transmit images
of ulcers, tumors and other gastric ailments in real
time.

Another
example of interdisciplinary collaboration is the
artificial cornea project, which is spearheaded by
three researchers in the Ophthalmology Department --
Christopher Ta, Jaan Noolandi and Phil Huie -- along
with Robert Waymouth of the Department of Chemistry
and Alan Smith of the Department of Biochemistry. The
researchers point out that corneal diseases have
caused blindness in as many as 10 million people
worldwide. By applying recent discoveries in polymer
chemistry, the research team hopes to develop
inexpensive artificial corneas that can be implanted
with a minimal risk of rejection by the patient.

Interdisciplinary
Initiatives

Last
May, the Bio-X Interdisciplinary Initiatives Program
(IIP) received 51 grant proposals from faculty across
the campus.

"We
struggled to determine which ones to fund because so
many of them were both innovative and
interdisciplinary," said IIP committee chair
Harvey Cohen. "We finally picked the 21 projects
we thought best exemplified the goals of Bio-X. These
proposals represent biology in its broadest
sense."

Cohen
also headed the IIP committee two years ago that
awarded the first round of Bio-X interdisciplinary
grants. "Those projects have been very
successful and have resulted in advances that could
not have occurred by individual scientists and
educators," he noted. "We are incredibly
excited about the highly interactive proposals by our
faculty this year and feel that many of them will be
even more successful."

Each
project will receive an average grant of $143,000
during the next two to three years. After that,
researchers are encouraged to obtain external sources
of funding. The following projects are among this
year's grant winners:

c
"Seismic Transmission and Detection of African
Elephant Vocalizations and Footfalls" (Simon
Klemperer, geophysics; Robert Sapolsky, biological
sciences; and Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell, pediatrics):
determining how elephant vocalizations propagate in
the ground and to what distances.

"This
year's awards were generously supported by President
[John] Hennessy," Scott said. "They are
part of the larger goal of Bio-X to bring people
together to create new types of science and
technology. They are a celebration of the ability of
people to work together in teams, which I hope will
become the norm at Stanford."

For a
complete list of 2002 IIP awards, visit the Bio-X
website at
http://biox.stanford.edu/initiatives_2.html.

Frontiers
seminar

On
Thursday, Nov. 14, at 4:15 p.m., Bio-X will hold its
monthly Frontiers in Interdisciplinary Sciences
seminar at the Teaching Center of the Science and
Engineering Quad (room 201) The speaker will be
Professor Larry S. B. Goldstein of the University of
California-San Diego, whose topic is "Molecular
Motor Proteins in Neuronal Signaling and
Disease." Those seeking additional background on
the subject can attend a pre-seminar at 3:15 p.m. in
room 101. Both events are free and open to the
public. For more information contact Fiona Sincock at
fsincock@stanford.edu.